Meg Eden Kuyatt — Autistic Author and School Speaker

Meg Eden Kuyatt is an autistic novelist, poet and creative writing teacher based in the Washington DC area, who speaks at school assemblies, classroom workshops, residencies and conferences. Her middle-grade novel in verse Good Different follows Selah, an autistic girl who masks to survive seventh grade and learns to advocate for her own needs and adjustments through writing poems. It received the 2024 ALA Schneider Family Book Award Honor and was named one of School Library Journal's Best Middle Grade Books of 2023, and is widely used for One School, One Book programmes.

Her presentations are interactive and adaptable to any age or group size, and work best for students in grades 2 to 12, with creative writing workshops available from age six. Topics include writing as a neurodivergent person, finding tools and adjustments as a neurodivergent person, playing in poetry, finding the story only you can tell, learning to write from video games, unlocking your own voice, and her own route to publication. Having started writing and publishing in high school, she has a particular interest in working with young writers, and she often invites students to talk about their own special interests and lean into them rather than hiding them to fit in.

Beyond Good Different, her children's novels with Scholastic include the Stoker-nominated The Girl in the Walls and the companion novel Perfect Enough, with Not Your Story forthcoming. Her poetry collection Drowning in the Floating World won the 2021 Towson Prize for Literature, and obsolete hill is forthcoming from Fernwood Press. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Maryland, College Park, and has taught creative writing since 2013. Visits are available virtually, as half-day or full-day sessions, and as small-group writing workshops and conversations.